Category: reader

Details of iOS and Android Device Encryption

swillden writes: There’s been a lot of discussion of what, exactly, is meant by the Apple announcement about iOS8 device encryption, and the subsequent announcement by Google that Android L will enable encryption by default. Two security researchers tackled these questions in blog posts: Matthew Green tackled iOS encryption, concluding that the change really boils down to applying the existing iOS encryption methods to more data. He also reviews the iOS approach, which uses Apple’s “Secure Enclave” chip as the basis for the encryption and guesses at how it is that Apple can say it’s unable to decrypt the devices. He concludes, with some clarification from a commenter, that Apple really can’t (unless you use a weak password which can be brute-forced, and even then it’s hard). Nikolay Elenkov looks into the preview release of Android “L.” He finds that not only has Google turned encryption on by default, but appears to have incorporated hardware-based security as well, to make it impossible (or at least much more difficult) to perform brute force password searches off-device. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Details of iOS and Android Device Encryption

Google has added some extra sites to the News section of its search listings, including–brace yours

Google has added some extra sites to the News section of its search listings, including—brace yourself—Reddit! We though we’d seen more kittens in the news recently. Read more…

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Google has added some extra sites to the News section of its search listings, including–brace yours

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M: A Graphical Leap For Gaming Laptops

The dirty little secret of GPU marketing is that laptop graphics chips are never as powerful as you’d think. Think you’re going to run a game maxed out at 2K resolution with the GeForce GTX 880M in your laptop? Think again—even if it’s no trouble for a desktop-grade GTX 780. Read more…

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M: A Graphical Leap For Gaming Laptops

NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture brings desktop-class performance and improved battery life to notebooks

Read through NVIDIA’s Maxwell desktop GPU announcement , and you might think you were looking at a feature set designed for laptops: lower power consumption, new anti-aliasing technology and a downsampling feature that can force any monitor to display 4K content. It sounds almost like a dream feature set for a portable gaming machine and, well NVIDIA agrees — today it’s officially launching the GeForce GTX 980M and 970M GPUs. If you didn’t read up on the company’s flagship GPU announcement, let us break it down for you: NVIDIA’s Maxwell GPUs are all about power efficiency with a hint of overkill graphics performance on the side. This is a combination of lower performance per watt, and implementing new technologies like Multi-Frame Sample Anti-Aliasing , the aforementioned technology that promises to boost performance by as much as 30-percent with no visual concessions. NVIDIA says it’s also made significant gains with its BatteryBoost feature, which limits in-game framerates and balances system performance to boost on-battery play time by 20 to 30-percent. As for that side of performance, well, not only do the new GPUs promise to perform better without being plugged into a wall outlet, but Maxwell’s new Dynamic Super Resolution (NVIDIA’s branded and optimized downsampling solution) is designed to put 4K-quality content on lower resolution screens. It’s kind of like lying to your computer’s monitor: the game is rendering itself at a 4K resolution and is filtered down to your laptop’s native 1080p display. NVIDIA’s new chips (and new GPU features) will be available in NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M and 970M-equipped laptops, starting today. Machines rocking the new hardware can be had from all the usual suspects: MSI’s GT72 and GS60 will have it, for instance, as well as the ASUS G751, Gigabyte Aorus X7 and the Clevo P150 (which will likely be rebranded under Origin PC or Maingear flags). How do these machines perform in practice? We’ll let you know as soon as one crosses our review desk. Filed under: Gaming , Laptops , NVIDIA Comments

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NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture brings desktop-class performance and improved battery life to notebooks

This Supercard Wants to Replace All of Your Credit Cards and Then Some

Remember Coin, the card that promised to put all your credit cards on one handy chunk of plastic , and then suffered from substantial setbacks that may make it useless by the time it comes out ? Well now it has a competitor. This is Plastc , another upcoming supercard with some seriously big promises that will be even harder to keep. Read more…

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This Supercard Wants to Replace All of Your Credit Cards and Then Some

OLED Wallpaper Could Be the Future of Lighting

It’s the Star Trek -inspired future we were promised—walls that glow and change color, perhaps with just a gentle voice command. And it’s finally (almost) possible thanks to a series of advances in OLED sheets. This new lighting solution also uses half as much energy than existing fluorescent lights. It is, however, pretty expensive. Read more…

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OLED Wallpaper Could Be the Future of Lighting

Soylent gets a version bump to 1.1—new flavor, new gut flora help

A single week of Soylent contains seven meal pouches and seven oil containers. Total weight is just about 10 lbs (4.5 kg). Lee Hutchinson Soylent, the slushy slightly sweet meal supplement/replacement from California engineer Rob Rhinehart and his company Rosa Labs, has by most accounts been a smashing success story. We tried it and liked it a year ago. While we wrote more about why folks might (or might not) want to drink it once it hit its official release , the Rosa Labs development team has continued work even as shipments of the powder leave the factory by the truckload. In an update e-mail yesterday morning, Rosa Labs announced two major milestones: first, that shipments have (finally) been completed to everyone who backed the Soylent crowdfunding project prior to its closure, and secondly, that Soylent is getting its first major update to version 1.1. It seems a little weird that food (or “food”) has a version number, but Rhinehart always intended Soylent to be a product that changed over time based on feedback and market forces. In a quick post on the official Soylent blog, Rhinehart explains that the bump to 1.1 brings with it a decrease in the product’s sucralose level, dialing down the release version’s vague sweetness to a more truly neutral taste. The logic here, explains the post, is that it’s easier to add sweetness than to take it away, and many Soylent 1.0 users have expressed a desire to flavor the product with add-ons (peanut butter is a popular one, as is blended fruit). The second change deals with my biggest issue with Soylent—what can be politely termed as “a bit of gas.” Regular Soylent use eliminates the gas, but using Soylent as an occasional substitute for a missed meal—which is my preferred usage of the stuff—can introduce some thunderous gut activity (which I referred to in my original Soylent review as ” horse-killing farts “). Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Soylent gets a version bump to 1.1—new flavor, new gut flora help

Blue LEDs given Nobel Prize in physics

Nobel Prize Committee Each year, roughly a quarter of the electricity we generate goes to lighting. For decades, that lighting came in the form of an incandescent light bulb, which produced 16 lumens for every Watt it was fed. Fluorescent bulbs are roughly five times as efficient, but recent LEDs do nearly 19 times better than incandescents, producing 300 lumens for each Watt. The first LEDs date back to 1907, but it’s only recently that their incredible efficiency has been brought to bear on the lighting market. One of the key holdups was our inability to generate a broad spectrum of colors. Specifically, we couldn’t make white light because we lacked the ability to produce blue LEDs. Now, the Nobel Prize in Physics is being given to three materials scientists who overcame this roadblock. The people receiving the honor are Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, both faculty at Nagoya University in Japan, and Shuji Nakamura, now of UC Santa Barbara, who did much of his key work while at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Japan. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Blue LEDs given Nobel Prize in physics